When I worked in admissions at Cornell, I often wished I could sit down with a student after reading their application and ask a few follow-up questions or suggest changes that could have made a meaningful difference in their outcome. Admissions, however, is a one-way process of reading and making decisions. Those applicants never had the benefit of my feedback.
Now I get to have those rewarding conversations whenever students take advantage of a Top Tier Admissions college Application Review, either before submitting their fall applications or after the unwelcome surprise of a denial or deferral in December.
Most college applicants seek at least some feedback on their personal statement. An English teacher may help with brainstorming in class, a school counselor may review it, or a well-intentioned relative may offer to proofread. But far fewer students have someone review their entire application just as an experienced admissions officer would, integrating their transcript, activities, honors, personal statement, Additional Information, curriculum listing, self-reported testing, Future Plans, intended major, resume, and school-specific supplements.
That whole-application perspective matters a lot because admissions officers do not encounter these components independently. Each piece changes how the others are understood. For example, the ordering of activities begins establishing an academic identity before the reader reaches the essays. An intended major changes the lens through which extracurricular activities are evaluated. Additional Information can clarify something important—or create a different impression than a student intended.
In short, applicants tend to optimize the individual pieces of an application, but admissions officers evaluate the emergent picture those pieces create together. I noticed this frequently while reading applications at Cornell, and I see it now from the counseling side. Often, the student has plenty of strong material, but nuanced problems can arise in how that material has been selected, organized, and connected.
Many applicants can have an impressive record and still leave an admissions officer puzzled about what matters most to them. An Application Review identifies those weaknesses so they can be fixed before submission.
Application Review Program
Do you have a compelling and strategic application package that will rise above the rest?
Start With the Academic Story
One of the first things I look for in an application is a clear sense of how the student has spent their time and where their intellectual interests are heading. That thread should weave through the application and help tie its pieces together.
At highly selective colleges, strong grades and testing establish academic readiness. The rest of the file helps the reader understand what engages the student intellectually, how those interests developed, what they might pursue next, and how they are likely to contribute to a campus community.
Maddie came to us after a Dartmouth Early Decision denial with a 3.93 GPA, a 1560 SAT, and leadership spanning Model UN, a business club, paid work, varsity swimming, and journalism. She had selected math as her prospective major, but there was relatively little advanced extracurricular mathematics supporting that choice at the most selective level. Meanwhile, her coursework and other experiences created a much stronger foundation in another academic direction. We helped her reorganize her application around that more coherent story. She later earned admission to three Ivy League schools in the tougher Regular Decision round.
Elle’s Stanford deferral presented a different version of the same underlying issue. She had a perfect GPA, a 36 ACT, seven AP scores of 5, and accomplishments spanning creative writing, political science, economics, research, playwriting, and poetry. There was no shortage of intellectual substance, but her application was scattered between multiple academic directions, which made refocusing it especially important. She was later admitted to Stanford, along with Rice, Penn, and Cornell.
These are the kinds of choices that become much easier to see when the whole application is reviewed together.
How the Activities List Shapes Your Entire Application
Most applicants spend enormous amounts of time on their 650-word personal statement and comparatively little time thinking about the order and wording of their activities. This is a mistake. Admissions readers move quickly, and the first few entries begin creating a framework for understanding the student. If an applicant hopes to study engineering, ideally I should already be thinking, I’m clearly reading an engineer’s application, as I move through the very first few activities.
Hunter came to us after being deferred by Duke University. Academically, he was exceptionally strong: a 4.0 unweighted/5.0 weighted GPA, a 1570 SAT from one sitting, advanced math, and four years in his school’s applied STEM curriculum. But his activities section told a very different story. Six of his ten entries were sports-related, and there was not a single STEM activity among them. Once we dug deeper, however, we found maker projects, engineering fairs, and experience with CAD software. We recommended consolidating and moving the sports entries lower while bringing his engineering projects forward. He ultimately earned admission to Duke, Northwestern, UVA, Dartmouth, and UNC Chapel Hill.
Nothing new happened between his deferral and Regular Decision; the experiences were already there. What changed was the way his application communicated them.
Is Your Personal Statement Doing Enough Work?
A personal statement can be beautifully written and still leave an admissions officer knowing too little about the student. One of the questions I ask when reviewing an essay is simple: What does this applicant want me to know about them? At TTA, we often favor an academic-forward personal statement that gives the reader insight into a student’s curiosity and intellectual vitality. That is certainly not the only successful approach. However, in the essays I’ve reviewed, students often go in unsuccessful directions by becoming so focused on making an essay memorable that they lean heavily on generic lessons about personal growth, forced quirkiness, or an elaborate metaphor. The writing may be polished while the student remains surprisingly hard to know.
Sometimes other parts of an application already contain the seed of a much stronger essay—an intellectual question, a research experience, an unusual academic obsession, or progression of interests—but the student has not recognized its potential in the essay portion. No one wants to rewrite an essay they have worked hard on. Occasionally, though, that is the change with the greatest impact, and it’s worth biting the bullet.
Don’t Overlook the Smaller Application Sections
A full application review also means examining the fields college applicants often complete once and then rarely revisit, including Future Plans, Honors, activity descriptions and rankings, Additional Information, school-change explanations, list of current coursework, and self-reported testing.
These fields may seem minor compared with a 650-word essay, but they matter too. For example, several times I have found that a student inadvertently left off past AP exam results and planned senior year AP exams – an easy but critical fix.
Hunter had four years of specialized and impressive engineering coursework appearing on his transcript under course name abbreviations such as “SELC PLTW Int Eng Ds Hnr173.” Any admissions officer moving quickly through the academic record would miss the real significance of that curriculum. We used Additional Information to provide a short explanation of the specialized STEM program to make it immediately clear to admissions readers.
Elle had significant writing accomplishments scattered throughout her application: John Locke Global Essay Contest recognition, creative writing projects including a play and a novel, a college writing course, and several Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Rather than asking an admissions reader to connect achievements spread across different sections of the application, we consolidated them within the Additional Information section so that they communicated a sustained and serious commitment to writing.
Small changes like these can significantly alter the cumulative read of the application and create far better admissions outcomes.
Use Supplemental Essays to Expand the Picture
The Application Review is also the time to look at the entire collection of supplemental essays in concert. A good set of supplements should reveal several different dimensions of the student. Yet students tend to write each essay independently and often repeat the same key experiences. When that happens, we return to the activities list and ask: What important part of this student has their application not yet shown? Often, there are excellent experiences sitting untouched in the activities section—a research project, a family responsibility, a community role, a job, an academic fascination, or a small but revealing story—that can add another dimension to the application.
How to Write a Stronger “Why Us” Essay
The “Why Us” essay presents a related problem. Students frequently fill these essays with the names of professors, courses, institutes, and programs without explaining why any of them matter. A strong “Why Us” essay needs both halves of the equation in balance: what the college offers and what in the student’s existing record explains why those opportunities matter to them. A particular course matters more when it extends a question the student has already been exploring. A campus organization becomes meaningful when it builds naturally from something they have already done in high school.
A little-known admissions truth is that these supplements are often more important than the personal statement, because each school created those essays specifically for its own admissions process. Throughout, the goal is to use limited application real estate efficiently, so each essay contributes something new while reinforcing a coherent overall picture.
Read Your Application From the Other Side of the Desk
Families will never see the full institutional context surrounding an admissions decision. There are priorities, comparisons, and conversations happening inside an admissions office that no applicant can control. But the application is the part over which a student has full control.
This is one of the aspects of this work I find most rewarding. As a Cornell admissions officer, I could read an application and recognize that a fascinating academic interest had been buried, that an essay had missed an opportunity, or that an activities list had created an incomplete picture of the student. I could use those observations to make a decision, but I could not sit down afterward and tell the student what I had seen.
Now I can.
In an Application Review, we candidly dissect each element of the application to identify where the reader’s understanding begins to drift, where important accomplishments are buried, and where thoughtful changes could make the student much easier to understand and admit. Sometimes that means rebuilding the main essay. Sometimes it means repositioning an academic interest, reorganizing all ten activities, clarifying specialized coursework, or reconsidering a set of supplements. Often, the most consequential revision is really a collection of smaller changes that allows the entire application to tell an even more convincing story about the applicant.
The student has already done the hard work. The goal of an Application Review is to make sure the admissions reader can see it.
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